His smile went dimply in the corners, too sincere to be pervy. “I’m happy to be wrong.”
“Ever Lawrence,” I said, hoping that I’d practiced it enough that it didn’t clunk out of my mouth. It was strange having so few syllables to get through. Elliot Gabaroche was always a lot to dump on another human being.
“Cornell Aaron,” the college boy said, sticking his hand out. He had fingers like my father’s, tapered, with clean, round nails. I spent the firm two-pump handshake wondering if he also got no-polish manicures. “I’ll be one of your counselors at Onward. It’s a quick drive from here.”
He took the handle of my suitcase without preamble and led the way toward the parking lot. I followed, my pulse leaping in the same two syllables that had wriggled between the folds of my brain and stamped out of my shoes and pumped through my veins for months.
Bunbury.
It was a stupid thing to drive you crazy, but here I was: running away from home in the name of Oscar Wilde.
2
Officially, my stepmother, Beth, sold real estate. That’s how she met my father. She’d needed a lawyer to help her with a contract dispute. Dad had lost her case but succeeded in knocking her up with my brother Ethan.
Real classy backstory here. I know.
To be fair, my mom and dad had been divorced for a while by the time Beth came into the picture. Mom had taken a job in Colorado, training cadets, and I’d ended up stuck in Sacramento to “maintain normalcy.”
Anyway, Beth sold real estate. But her true passion was theater. She spent summers working at Shakespeare in the Park and winters hosting soirees for the other middle-aged people who worked regular day jobs and spent their nights doing scene work.
It wasn’t all bad. She’d been in some good shows over the years. And some terrible shows that had fun results. Like when she’d been in a version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream where all of the fairies were supposed to be extraterrestrial and she willingly sat through all four Alien movies with me for research. Or when the Shakespeare company’s fight coordinator had cut me a deal on Muay Thai classes.
The trouble with my stepmother was The Importance of Being Earnest.
Somehow, she had ended up in the same play six times in ten years. Always in the same part. Sometimes in the same costume. There was something about her that made directors yearn to put her in an Empire waist dress and make her quip in a fake British accent. She called herself a career Gwendolen.
I thought, for sure, that after she turned forty, it’d stop happening. But a few weeks ago, as we’d all sat down to dinner at our favorite pizza place downtown, she’d proved me wrong.
“I have an announcement,” she’d said, swirling her wineglass until she’d kicked up a tiny cabernet typhoon. “Woodland has asked me to return to Earnest.”
A chunk of tomato fell out of my father’s mouth. Ethan slumped in his chair and groaned. I chugged iced tea until I thought I might puke. Honestly, I think that the entire Gabaroche family would have preferred she just have another kid.
Beth flicked a piece of faux-red hair out of her eyes with her index fingernail. “Well, at least I know all of the lines already.”
Which meant that she’d already said yes. Balls.
“Isn’t she getting a little long in the tooth for this shit?” my mom had asked, a few days later. She probably meant “theater” as a concept and not just Earnest. Mom had a hard time wrapping her mind around Beth. Real estate and theater and PTA fund-raisers all rang fictional to Lawrence ears.
I hadn’t meant to bring up the influx of Wilde in the house to my mother, but Beth had already started humming lines to herself. While washing dishes: The announcement will appear in the Morning Post. Checking over Ethan’s homework: Ah! that is clearly a metaphysical speculation. Nestled into the crook of Dad’s neck as they watched TV: Am I not, Mr. Worthing?
And since we’d all seen the play a thousand times, most of the time someone knew the next line to keep her going. No one wanted to say it, but it was a compulsion. Like knowing the answer when the teacher isn’t looking at you.
“It wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t going to be all summer,” I told Mom, pressing the phone hard against my ear. Mom refused to video chat. She said she didn’t want to have to do her hair every time she checked up on me. I never pointed out that, with air force dress regulations, her hair was pretty much always done anyway. “But I won’t even have homework to distract me. I’ll end up getting dragged to every performance. They’ll make me work the concessions stand again.”
There were no tips in the concessions stand. All tips went back into the theater to keep the lights on. Community theater doesn’t pay anyone but directors and technicians. Everyone else is supposed to be there for the love of the craft.
Love couldn’t gas up my car.
“You can’t choose your deployment, baby girl. You can tough out one more summer in Sacramento. It’s your last one,” Mom said. She liked to forget that I wouldn’t be moving the second I left high school. Sometimes, I liked to live in that fantasy, too. “Soak up all those creature comforts while you’ve got them.”
I took a deep breath, squared my shoulders, and spent another week quoting pieces of the play back to Beth as I skipped past her on my way to school and when I helped prep dinner.
And then the envelope arrived with “Elliot Lawrence Gabaroche” stamped to the front and the USAF wings printed in the top left corner.
Subtlety has never been one of my mom’s accomplishments.
The pamphlet was for the summer program at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, for high school kids who wanted all of the fun of cadet life minus the flying. And since Mom happened to work at the academy, it’d be only too easy to get me a last-minute placement.
Beth understood all of this in the instant that it took to take the envelope out of the mailbox. I could see it in the flinty way she looked at me over the dining room table.
Even after a decade of experience, I’d never learned how to translate Beth’s eyes. They were blue and always seemed to be saying a lot in a language I didn’t know. Dad’s eyes were oaky brown like mine and Ethan’s. Brown eyes said yes or no. Beth’s eyes had subtext. She meant well, but the motives were churning around in all that blue. Translating her would require a degree in meteorology.
She had made it her mission to find me a summer distraction that wouldn’t end in me joining the reserves. She and Dad liked to imply that the armed forces had stolen my mother from me. Which wasn’t true. The air force didn’t have rules about being married to shallow narcissists who got whiny about not being the breadwinner. She wasn’t stolen. She just went. If she’d been a teacher or a pharmacist or something, maybe someone would have stopped and asked her why she didn’t want to be my mom every day.